Roger Dean: The man behind the fantastical Yes album covers

Original artwork by Roger Dean for the Yes album 'Fly from Here'… (CONTRIBUTED PHOTO )

June 15, 2012|By Tim Higgins, Special to The Morning Call

You might not know Roger Dean's name, but you've almost certainly seen his work. Here's a clue — for those of you of a certain age, just think the band Yes.

The British artist's celebrated cover paintings of floating islands and primordial stone arches for the progressive rock band (extending from the early '70s to today) had almost as much to do with the band's popularity as its music. Yes guitarist Steve Howe once remarked, "There is a pretty tight bond between our sound and Roger's art."

That bond was evident in everything from the covers, to the famed Yes bubble logo and even the band's live stage shows, where the elaborate sets were designed by Roger and his brother Martyn.

Dean's multi-faceted career as artist, designer, architect and publisher will be the subject of his lecture on June 21 at the Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley in conjunction with its show "At the Edge: Art of the Fantastic."

"I don't really think of myself as a fantasy artist but as a landscape painter," says Dean, who has work in the show. "Actually, I'm not sure where I fit in."

Dean's legendary status stems from his work with some of the earliest heavy metal and progressive rock bands of the late 1960s post-pop British Invasion, including Budgie, Atomic Rooster, Uriah Heep and Gentle Giant. Dean estimates he created cover and poster art for 60 to 70 bands.

It is commonly accepted that Dean, along with his good friend Storm Thorgerson of the design group Hipgnosis (think Pink Floyd), redefined the album cover during the heyday of prog rock, transforming album art from the typical staid band photo to works of art.

"We became associated with the music of the time," says the 67-year-old Dean, speaking from his home on the south coast of England, about 50 miles south of London just outside Brighton. "What the band actually looked like ceased to be important."

The dominant form of recorded music 50 years ago was the 12-inch vinyl LP, and part of the joy of shopping at the record store was to flip through bins of stacked LPs where the album covers were a large part of the sell, especially when it came to obscure English bands you never heard of and that received little mainstream air play in America. Today, that cover art is a collectible in its own right.

"I did a lot of covers for bands that were very experimental," he says. "They weren't all good bands, but very experimental." Dean's first album cover was for the 1968 British band The Gun, which had a minor hit with the song "Race with the Devil."

Dean had been doing interior and furniture designs for Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club in London, still one of the pre-eminent jazz clubs in England. One of his designs was the sea urchin chair, a foam chair that appeared spherical but would immediately conform to the sitter. It's now in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. From that experience Dean also designed the famous retreat pod chair for Scott's club, which was eventually featured in the film "A Clockwork Orange."

"Ronnie Scott also managed The Gun," explains Dean. "He saw my sketchbook and noticed a painting he wanted to use as the cover. That led to my first album cover. I got paid about £5,000 for that."

By 1971, requests for Dean's artwork started pouring in. There was Atomic Rooster's "In Hearing of ..." followed by the African-Caribbean band Osibisa, for which he drew a fantasy hybrid elephant with insect wings. The signature Dean style of fantasy landscape combined with a wild organic architecture was beginning to form and later that same year it would lead to his long collaboration with Yes, beginning with the "Fragile" album.

"You know, speaking of the Yes logo, there's an interesting story. During a signing, someone asked me to do the Yes logo so I started to draw the square logo and he said 'no, no, no … I want the famous logo, the bubble logo.' Well, I told him, 'I can't remember how to do it.' The truth is, I only ever drew things once. I had done six sketches of it, to get it right, but I only ever drew it once!"

Outside of his work with Yes, two of Dean's most famous cover designs were for the Welsh power trio Budgie and their albums "Squawk" (1972) and "Never Turn Your Back on a Friend" (1973). The design for Squawk was based on a kit model of the SR-71 spy plane to which Dean had affixed a bird skull, painted it red and then drew it against a deep blue background.

"I once met an engineer who worked at the famed Skunk Works in Nevada," says Dean, referring to the top-secret military installation popularly known as Area 51. "He told me that they had painted a 160-foot replica of the Squawk cover on the side of one of their hangars. I said to him, 'Can you take a picture of it for me?' And he looked at me and said, '... No, I'll go to prison for life!' "

"You have to remember, that with designs like the ones I did for Budgie, I was really learning as I went along, you know."